[tor-talk] The Aqua design (was: A possible solution to traffic correlation attacks)

[Philipp Winter]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2016 at 02:34:22PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
> You need fulltime regulated fill traffic, within which, your traffic resides.

The Aqua design goes in that direction.  It is a traffic
analysis-resistant anonymity system for BitTorrent:
<https://research.microsoft.com/pubs/199302/sigcomm13-aqua.pdf>

It handles traffic at the network edges differently than the core, to
achieve low-latency resistance to traffic analysis.  At the edges, it
dynamically groups clients with similar usage patterns together to
provide k-anonymity.  The network core consists of nodes that exchange
constant-rate traffic that is padded when necessary.

However, Aqua cannot protect against long-term intersection attacks and
the authors haven't really thought about incentives for joining the
network; I could see the network only being used for illegal file
sharing, making it an attractive target for blocking with low collateral
damage.